About Gordon

Living alone on a reporter's salary meant Gordon Dritschilo had to learn how to cook, which he threw himself into with a geekish passion. In the process, went from the sort of person who orders a cheeseburger at a fancy restaurant to having a reputation as the guy who will eat anything.

For Beginners

02/07/2013

I like to use one potato per person I’m serving, plus one or two more on top of that, just to be sure. The brown-skinned varieties serve better here than the red-skinned ones, but if red is what you got, they’ll do fine.

Peel them, cut them up and drop them into a pot of boiling water. How long is going to depend on how big or small the chunks are, but when you can poke a fork into them without any resistance, they’re done. A slight drizzle of olive oil over the top helps keep the pot from boiling over.

Drain them, sprinkle in some salt and go to town with a potato masher. For standard mashed potatoes, you want to add a splash of milk and some butter as you mash them.

You don’t want to make standard mashed potatoes, though. You want to make fancy-pants mashed potatoes, so pick whichever of the approaches below best fits with your tastes.

Gorgonzola: Before pouring in the splash of milk, heat it on the stove and melt some crumbled-up Gorgonzola or other stinky blue cheese into it. (Why is this separate from “Cheesey?” Because Gorgonzola is awesome, that’s why!)

Bacon: Cook a strip of bacon (pancetta, the Italian bacon, works exceptionally well for this for some reason) per potato or two. Chop up the bacon and mash into the potatoes along with the bacon drippings.

Roasted garlic: Take two heads of garlic and break up the cloves. Place them on a doubled-over sheet of aluminum foil and drizzle with olive oil, wrap up in the foil and cook in a 350 oven for 30 minutes. You should be able to pop them right out of the skins, though you may want to let them cool for a minute or two. Then mash an appropriate-looking number into the potatoes. Save remaining cloves for midnight snacks

There is no reason you cannot combine any, or even all of these -- I once did cheesey roast garlic pancetta mashed potatoes -- though it will start to feel excessive at some point.

09/12/2012

Going right to the top of my Christmas list is "The Hemingway Cookbook," which, according to the publishing blurb, assembles recipes from his favorite places to eat and "other sources." Truth be told, I will probably never have occasion to make "Fillet of Lion washed down with Campari and Gordon’s Gin or a cool Cuba Libre," but if the opportunity ever does present itself, I intend to be prepared!

For the ambitious among you, Michael Ruhlman has posted instructions on making your own salt. We're a little too far from the ocean for me to try this regularly, but I may give this a whirl the next time I'm vacationing near a beach.

I'm linking to The Guardian not once, but twice today. First, they have this selection of recipes for 1920s cocktails -- there's a bit of irony here in that the fruity cocktail was essentially invented in the 1920s in order to disguise the godawful taste of the bathtub liquor Americans were drinking during Prohibition. Then, they have this collection of cooking advice for the student who just returned to college.

07/03/2012

In keeping with the theme launched yesterday, this is the outdoor version of my idiot-proof chicken.

"Let me guess," you may be thinking, "I take a chicken breast, marinate it with something and throw it on the grill."

WRONG!

Grilled chicken breast, while not rocket science, isn't exactly idiot proof. It can easily come out dry, which I guess you can live with, or undercooked, which you might not be able to live with. Barbecued chicken thigh, on the other hand, is completely idiot proof.

Thighs actually have more flavor than breasts. They are the poultry equivalent of the pork shoulders I mentioned yesterday, but do not involve nearly the same time commitment. They also have the virtue of being inexpensive, especially when bought in bulk.

Start with one chicken thigh (bone-in, skin-on) per person, plus and extra one or two in case you have big eaters or want to have leftovers. Put them in a Ziplock bag with some store-bought barbecue sauce (Sweet Baby Ray's has been my favorite lately) and let them marinate for an hour or two. You can, of course, use any number of other marinades (I did a lemon-rosemary thing not too far back) but we're talking about barbecue this week.

Build a fire well over on one side of your grill and place the thighs on the other side. Cover, close the vents to where they are three-quarters open and cook. After 45 minutes, open the grill, chuck in another handfull of charcoal and rotate and/or rearrange the thighs so they cook evenly. Cover the grill again and cook for another 45 minutes.

07/02/2012

I'm a bad blogger. The first week I was off, and I won't bore you with my excuses for last week.

Anyway, I'm back, and since summer has descended on us with a vengeance and it's Fourth of July week, I think it's time for a post on the great American cuisine: barbecue.

The first thing you need to know is that barbecue is NOT a synonym for "grilled." Nor does it mean "grilled food covered in barbecue sauce." Barbecue is a slow-cooking method using a covered grill and a low smokey fire. Much like with braising, barbecuing turns tough cuts of meat into tender, flavorful mouthfuls.

You do not need one of those huge oil-drum set-ups to make barbecue. A decent backyard grill will suffice, though you want a relatively deep one with easily adjustable vents. Nor do you need fancy wood chips. Charcoal will get the job done. The wood chips are nice, though. You could also take some green sprigs of growth from a tree in your backyard, like my mother does with an apple tree. Got some firewood leftover from the winter? Smaller, shorter logs are good for barbecuing.

One of the easiest and most rewarding cuts of meat to barbecue is the pork shoulder, also called the picnic shoulder and Boston butt. In some parts of the country, barbecue means "pork shoulder." They run from four to 10 pounds. You want one with the bone in and skin on.

You will want a rub. A mixture of kosher salt, freshly cracked black pepper, paprika, dry mustard, minced garlic (or garlic powder) and minced onion (or onion powder) will give you a starting place from which to tinker. Mix it and rub it all over the surface of the meat.

A barbecue pork shoulder is an all-day effort. You'll need to allow six to eight hours for it. Start a fire over on one side of your grill and set the meat on the other side. Then cover the grill and close the top and bottom vents so that they are only one-quarter open. Every 45 minutes or so, throw in another handful of charcoal.

The meat is done when you can plunge a large fork straight down into the center and pull it out with no resistance. Take it off the grill, shred it, mix it with whatever sauce you are using and either serve it as-is or in the fluffiest, cheapest white sandwich rolls you can find. Make sure you try the skin.

The leftovers from this keep for a week (more if you freeze them) and are highly versatile.

06/06/2012

Often, when you brown meat (and sometimes other foodstuffs) in a hot pan with some fat, a brown crust forms on the surface of the pan. This brown crust has a lot of great flavor that you want to preserve, either in the liquid you will use to braise the meat or in a sauce you will serve with it.

To do so, once the meat has been removed from the pan, you pour in a splash of liquid and then use a wooden spoon to scrape up and dissolve the crusty stuff. This is called "deglazing" and is an important step in many, many recipes.

I included the instruction "deglaze" in one of the very first recipes I posted here, to which a certain colleague commented, "Whoah, dudeman, you can't use words like 'deglaze.' People, like, totally won't know what you're talking about, bro."

As much as it pained me to take advice offered in such terms, I admitted he might have a point, and avoided the word in favor of a description of the process. However, I have since grown tired of typing out the phrase "scrape up and dissolve all the crusty bits with a wooden spoon" and see no reason to keep doing so when there is a perfectly good word meaning just that.

So, if you saw the word "deglaze" in a recipe and followed a link here thinking "What the heck does 'deglaze' mean?" consider yourself enlightened. No go back to whatever recipe brought you here and cook it!

05/08/2012

Well, it was out yesterday. Today is more of a stay inside and make stew kind of day. Still, summer is almost here, and yesterday I grilled my first London broil of the season.

I have discussed London broil before, albeit briefly. It tends to be one of the less expensive of the grill-worthy cuts of beef, and produces leftovers that will make you very happy at lunchtime the day after you cook it. Typically a thick flank steak, London broil benefits from, but does not necessarily require, a long period marinating. It is tough meat, but when served rare and sliced thin is manageable enough.

First things first: You want the thickest London broil you can get your hands on. The goal is a solid sear on the outside giving way to whichever shade of pink you prefer in the center, and for that you need a thick hunk of meat.

If you plan ahead enough that you have the thawed London broil on-hand on the morning of the day you plan to cook it, a marinade of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, onion, garlic, thyme and maybe a splash of red wine will soften the meat up and give it some traditional flavor. If all that is too much work, Italian dressing makes a good marinade in a pinch.

(A lot of fancy salad dressings double as marinades, something I learned back when idiot-proof chicken was my standard dinner.)

You can take this in other directions with teriyaki sauce or tandoori paste, depending on your mood, but sometimes it's best to stick with the classics.

If the London broil is more of an impulse purchase on your way home from the office, as it was yesterday, never fear -- you can still make a mighty fine grilled steak. Once the fire is going (you want all the coals on one side of the grill), pat the meat dry with paper towels, brush it with olive oil and sprinkle it generously with kosher salt and freshly cracked black pepper.

If you're hoping I'm going to tell you exactly how long to grill the steak for that perfect degree of doneness, I'm going to have to disappoint you. Every fire and every steak is different, and this kind of cooking has to be done largely by feel. If developing that feel involves some overcooked steaks along the way, just remember that you're working toward a goal.

Last night, the meat was a lovely shade of brown after about two minutes on each side. Then I rotated the grill so the meat was no longer directly over the heat (if you're using a square grill you'll have to just pick it up and move it with tongs) and covered it. This takes it off the direct heat so the browning stops (or, really, slows to the point where it effectively stops) but surrounds the meat with enough heat to keep it cooking toward that nice, pink center.

Now, the grand poobah grillmeisters all seem to say that you should only cover the grill when you're using it to slow cook something for hours on end, and I believed them for a while, but when I have covered my grill for shorter cooking I've never noticed that ashy flavor they always threaten me with. So, now I just cover the darn thing when I think it will help.

Are you familiar with the poke test? Poke the meat with your finger and compare how it feels to the skin between your thumb and forefinger. If the meat feels like the webbing, it's rare. If it feels like the skin nearer the joint, it's closer to medium. When it feels like the skin by the knuckle, it's well done.

I have mixed results with this test. Sometimes it works, sometimes I spend about a minute poking the meat and pinching myself before I say to heck with it and cut a little nick in the steak so I can peek inside and check that way. If you go with the latter method, you want to take it off when it is slightly less done than you like it.

Do not slice up the meat right after you take it off the grill. Let it sit, covered with foil, for about 10 minutes. There's this chemical thing going on inside the meat with the moisture and the protiens and you'll be much happier if you don't cut into it right away.

When you do slice it, do so against the grain, in slices as thin as possible, at as much of an angle as you can. I've seen thick London broil sliced in a way that resembles roast beef. A green salad,a hunk of bread and a glass of red wine are all you really need to go with it.

04/18/2012

Beans are essential to those of us who want to have large, flavorful and inexpensive pots of leftovers which can be microwaved in small batches at various points in the week.

The problem is that there are a lot of different types of beans. For those who stare in uncomfortable wonderment at a full supermarket shelf, here's what I like to use and how:

Cannelini beans, or white beans, are my first choice for doing anything European. Combinations or tomatoes, stock, white wine, garlic, rosemary and/or thyme go well with white beans. They're the only bean suitable for Monday's Italian sausage dish and could serve as a substitute for the potatoes in this ground beef concoction.

Black beans are what I go to for Mexican flavors: cumin, cilantro, onions, garlic and smoked chili peppers. Chorizo and black beans are practically made for each other. Black beans are at the core of my all-purpose Mexican meat filling.

Chickpeas, I have found, are at their best carrying south asian flavors: cumin, ginger, coriander, turmeric. Perusing my archive, it seems I haven't written much on chickpeas, something I'll have to rectify. They would have been at home in my Number 9-stewed lamb and are a great way to stretch any curry.

Kidney beans, I don't much like outside of chili, but they are great in chili. Barbecue-style baked beans also really need standard kidney beans. Other than that, I don't use them much.

Now, the foodie police will tell you that you must (MUST!) get dried beans. If you are willing to deal with the soaking and rinsing and boiling, you will save money. If you want convenience, though, Goya makes some darn good beans which you should use with a clean conscience.

03/08/2012

Corned beef and cabbage is a braise. That means it takes a lot of time but not much labor and produces a big pot of hearty food whose leftovers you can keep chipping away at through the week.

Corned beef is brined brisket. "Corned" is an archaic term for "salted" so this dish does not involve any yellow kernels -- unless you want it to.

You can buy pre-brined hunks of brisket in big plastic bags from the supermarket. Shortly after St. Patrick's Day, the stores will be marking down the leftovers, several of which will disappear into my freezer. Corned beef makes great chili (just don't add any salt) and can also be disposed of in potato dishes, rice dishes, macaroni and cheese, burritos and, of course, sandwiches.

To make a corned beef and cabbage dinner, get yourself a hunk of corned beef and a head of cabbage (hey - I'm being real basic, here). Get some red potatoes, too. Cut the cabbage into wedges and the potatoes into eighths.

Now, you need liquid to cook all this in. Guinness is obvious, other beer is acceptable, stock wouldn't be bad. Water will do in a pinch (but would benefit greatly from a pig's foot or two).

So, pat the meat dry, brown it in some butter or oil, take it out and pour in a splash of liquid, scraping up and dissolving any crusty brown stuff in the pot. Put the meat back in the pot with the cabbage wedges, the potatoes and enough liquid to come about halfway up the sides.

Bring to a boil, cover and put in the oven. Like with yesterday's stew formula, you can have this done in about two hours at 325 or let it go longer at lower temperatures.

Carve the meat in thick slabs against the grain. Serve with some grainy mustard and a good beer.

03/07/2012

I'm trying not to cut it as close with the St. Patrick's Day posts as I did with Valentine's Day.

Irish food gets a bad rap, and it's not entirely deserved. I'd advise against ordering a sandwich in Dublin, but the dishes the Irish do well are hearty and pleasing.

Irish stew is iconic and easy to make. It doesn't even seem worth formally typing up a recipe. I will, instead, offer a few pointers and principles.

You can use beef. You should use lamb. Lamb is traditional and delicious. Leg of lamb, cut into cubes between one and two inches in size, will be easiest to work with. You can dredge the cubes in flour, which will make browning easier and help thicken the liquid, but that's an optional step. I usually can't be bothered with it.

You should, of course, use Guinness as the liquid, but if you also use some stock, you will get a richer, meatier-flavored stew. If you have something against Guinness, any solid porter or stout should do the trick. I don't know what you might have against Guinness, but I refuse to discount the possibility of an avowed Guinness-hater reading up on how to make Irish stew.

Carrots, celery, onions and peas should all go into the pot. The peas are optional, but they fit in well and let's not pretend we couldn't eat more vegetables. You may substitute leeks for the onions, or use them in addition to the onion. You don't need leeks, but you want them. Leeks are yummy, great in stews and fit in with the other flavors here.

I'm sure you'd never dream of skipping the potatoes, right?

Finally, you'll want some thyme, some butter and some salt and pepper.

So, pat the meat dry, season it and brown it in the butter. Remove the meat, sweat the onion and add a splash of the liquid, scraping up any brown bits on the bottom of the pot. Add the rest of the vegetables, the thyme, the potatoes and enough liquid to cover and bring to a boil.

Now you cover the pot and put it in the oven. You can adjust oven temperature based on how long you want to cook it. For dinner in two hours, set the oven at 325. If you're getting started four to six hours ahead, go for 275.

You may want to cook the liquid down a bit before serving, which you can do over high heat on the stove, stirring gently to keep anything from sticking to the bottom.

02/29/2012

I used to make fondue a lot, and I started getting really fancy with it: complex beers as the liquid base, combinations of artisanal cheeses, seasonings with lots of adjectives in their names.

When my daughter arrived, suddenly having a pot of molten cheese and an open flame in the living room seemed about as good an idea as entering a demolition derby after taking LSD.

So, we didn't make it for a while. I hadn't even given it much thought before finding out we were having a vegetarian (well, not really -- she eats fish, but that's close enough for me) over for dinner Saturday. When I was told she had no problems with dairy, the answer seemed clear: fondue!

None of that was firing my imagination, or my taste buds. I realized that I just wanted some fondue, already.

Basic, then. What's that tiny hunk of cheese in the back of my fridge? Asiago. Okay, we'll use that up, and get enough of something Swiss-like (I went with Jarlsberg) to bring the weight up to a pound along with whichever Argentinian chardonnay is on sale this week and I'm in business.

No veal stock. No truffle oil. I might have given in to the urge to throw in a splash of Madeira, but the cork was broken in half and stuck -- it's a long story, don't ask.

So, two cups of the wine comes up to a simmer while the cheese gets grated and tossed with a spoonful of flour. Then, the cheese is melted into the wine a handful at a time and, okay, maybe a pinch each of Coleman's mustard and my fancy Spanish paprika find their way into the pot, but that's it, I swear.

The danger zone I come into with fondue is I always think I need to cook it a little thicker. Remember, it's going to keep cooking down while you eat, so you want to serve it while it's still drippy.

What to dip in it? A quartered and sliced baguette and some chunks of cauliflower. That's it. Done. Now it's just you and a bunch of friends sitting around a table (preferably with a fire in the background) dunking things in melty cheese.